


Elsa Antonia

by Daftheed



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Autism, Autism Spectrum, Childhood, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:10:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7351027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daftheed/pseuds/Daftheed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elsa has been letting the night catch up to her again and her mind is buzzing with activity. But even now, she cant sleep. Her restlessness is getting to her and people befuddle her at every step. She seeks to understand others, but what do the others want? And why are they so loud?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Elsa Antonia

She sat, alert, trying to ignore the sounds of the birds. Elsa Antonia had been awake the whole night. She was not happy, nor sad. She was deep into work. Work that required her best attention.

Elsa had always found her attention peaking in the nightime. She wasn't sure if it was her medication, or hyperactive nature, or just her. But she knew whatever it is was helping for the moment.

The sounds were of the birds in waking, ready for the approaching day. God how she hated them. She could hear every slithering note, every secondary sound, the branches rustling as they stood on and off them.

Looking again at her chessboard, positioned in front of her on the bed she plotted her next move. She was nude except for some sparse nightclothes. Clothes were, at best, tolerable and at worst impossible to cope with. They clung, they dragged along skin, they made her sweat and their material and her flesh did not mesh or compliment eachother. It was a pale discomfort. To feel as if you are being touched all the time. It made her itch and cover her arms more, to keep them from feeling the air.

Air or Cloth, it did not matter, she hated the feeling of anything on her skin and had to work not to think similarly of the skin itself. She always had an urge to pick at it.

Her mind and her body were in a constantly shifting stalemate.

She was nearing the endgame now. Her imaginary opponent was running out of ideas, but so was she.

Its going to be a draw, I think.

She looked with dread to the sky outside the window. The country was gorgeous and she had to work not to get lost in the wind and the waves of wheat.

Then, bored with this, she imagined a giant chessboard in place of the field. Which piece would she be?

Princess? That isn't a piece. Queen it was then, but she didn't feel up to it. She ran her hand perpendicularly across her stomach. She was getting mentally stimulated.

The thought of a giant chessboard! She was already feeling giddy. Her arms forced themselves down by her sides and her eyes focused, if that was the right word, on the tree at the other end of the field.

I could sit on that tree and watch the game. I can play and the field could have a board carved into it!

Then she imaged some of her favourite checkmates. It was becoming intense to think about and she felt the weight in her arms, which only drove her on. The best ones involved the enemy pieces, where the king is stopped by his own men. She was drinking these thoughts in, the field as a backdrop. She was getting hyper off the feeling of scale and depth as the pieces stood watching.

But as the bird once again snapped her from her loss of the world, she felt tired again. She really really did not want to sleep. But stalemates were boring and the sky was forming a warm colour.

She was always afraid of it. The sun coming up. She relished winters days, where the nights were long and the days short. Days meant riding her bike across the dirt road where every bump was memorised. She wanted to power forward but had to wait for her Mother, her Mothers friend and the other two children she lived across from. Even here, in the countryside, she had to socialise, it seemed. But in truth she liked them. They were a brother and sister pair of differing interests. But they would tussle, playfully and so did Elsa. Elsa could only tolerate touch as long as she knew she could force it off of her form and withdraw.

When she was even younger, she had been a violent child, lashing out at everything she couldn't comprehend.

She thought of all that was ahead of her, knocking several chess pieces over. Coming to, she yawned and accepted her defeat. Every night she sat up willing the sun to never come and every night it eventually showed, which she found rather obfuscating. She didn't want to be awake when that happened. This was too nice. Her muscles were relaxed, her back was sore but that was her fault, from hunching. She loved being alone. Not having to worry about picking her nose or looking interested in other peoples things all the time. Her face could relax, her mind could ease and she could experience the world through her own compensating filters when she was faced with something foreboding. That tended to be just about anything she hadnt experienced before.

She climbed down the short ladder of her raised bed and with chess pieces and board, set about placing them all very carefully into their place. The brown desk had her globe and various bits of things from past adventures. She found her memory lacking whenever she did anything outdoors, so she took to collecting interesting objects if she could; anything from stealing pens to chalk, coloured rocks on beaches or a walking stick to balloons (Though she hated helium balloons). Also toy guns and anything purple. These brought her back to a particular point in the past, and she could relive it again for a moment. She always liked doing that. The past was not yet darkened in her memory.

She spent several minutes putting the pieces in the right places. Her eyes were by now long suited to the dark, somewhat pointlessly. Finally satisfied, she lay again on her bed, and heard again the bird, the wind passing her window, the click of the clock in the hallway outside her room. Again.

She damned her ears. Damned them. They were so sensitive. It had its uses. She was never lost to conversations in a distance and she could always tell what it was her parents were talking about. She knew if her mother was in good spirits or bad and could decipher by tone alone if her Mother was stressed. Yet if one approached Elsa and spoke to her, she would be very careful at listening. Words were her one ally in a world that refused to make sense to her. She wasn't sure but people had all sorts of rules about speaking that troubled her and though she wasn't sure why this was agreed to by every person she had ever met, she missed alot from whatever was said to her.

"You cant just say no to someone, dear. You have to be nice"

Nice. That word. It meant so many things that it hurt Elsa's head to use it. All she could think about was how many ways it could be used. Some people looked nice, some people were nice, some people are nice, some things feel nice and some actions are nice.

And 'Nice' is such a boring word, as well.

Elsa was getting bored of herself now and the clock was ticking mercilessly forward. Why was she wasting her time confusing herself more about the rules of other people? Her otherness was not always so pleasant when other people were about and it was stifling to have it on her mind when she was alone, when she could be sure of more sympathetic company.

She could hear the clock. She tried to make it go away or at least seem softer and she almost succeeded. But when she tried to sleep, there it was again. It seemed the sound was the same each time, but to Elsa there may as well have been a machine gun chewing up and spitting out bullets like someone chomping on pistachio nuts.

It would not stop.

It was all she could think about. So, she decided after a moments thought, to carry herself out of bed, once again exhausted. She opened her cupboard over the course of two minutes, for fear of waking up anyone else. Her general light-weighted-ness and taut feet were a help. It was night time so dark colours were needed. She knew if she was caught she would have to blend in with the dirt road amongst the stones and glass-like muck that beheld rocks. But she had nothing in brown. Black it was then.

The jacket was waterproof, which was good. She wouldn't have worn it otherwise. Such coats had nothing to grab or fiddle with. She liked to have something to play with and preferably chew.

"Dont chew your zipper. See, this is why you run out of clothes so much, Elsa."

Trackies on and not bothering with underwear, as the night looked warm, she crept slowly out of her room, speeding up the opening of the door just before every creak. Upon opening her door, the clock got louder but more defined. She could hear the low buzz of the fridge in the room 10 feet down the hall on her left and the compact little sounds of dripping from the bathroom to her right. She took a minute to handle it. Her brain always took everything in, necessary or not.

She concentrated on the red door that lead to the outside. She was fortunate; the back garden steps were on the other side and her room sat opposite it. And every other member of the household was sleeping on the other side of the building. It was useful having a building with no stairs.

Now accustomed to these new sounds and the different smells, Elsa took one step, picking it out amongst the floor for silence.

Regulate breathe. Dont breath too much, or it might be loud.

The sun was still red, nicely competing with the blue sky.

Elsa Antonia was going for a 4 am walk.


	2. Chapter 2

The door opened with painful slowness. Elsa could smell it. The metal and paint that was peeling, the strange feeling of its wooden treatment.

Then the rush of air, It was calm, like a petal on water. But she focused on it, pausing to absorb it. Enjoying it, she opened it more and peered on to the other side.

She lifted herself up, with lingering pain from her exhaustion. The garden was beautiful. The trampoline lay, covered in water from the last days rain. The stone steps, like a throne almost, led down to the grass. There was a greenhouse at the far end and then the fence, then the road, then her neighbours garden. There was a hedge to her left.

She thought about all these things, trying to remind herself of what she was doing. She shivered at the chill of the calm wind. She was already cold, but as she eased the door closed behind her, the sound of the air attracted her. It was like a very calm whisper. The wheat field to the right added to the acoustic pleasure. She outstretched her arms and felt the wind.

Which way is it going? She stood, ignorant of everything and for all considerations, happy. The jacket was getting still though and her skin hated it. Soon the gentle wind was forcing her to move to. Movement made the sensation of touch spread over her from the clothes and thus, bother her less. Better to have pain all over her that is easy to ignore, that irritations which persists and get worse with time.

She reached the grass and strolled more. She soon found her way over the fence, doing a single leap over it, as the metal bars would make too much noise for footwork.

Ah. That rush of air. Theres a car on the road, down the dirt path, but its so far away. It doesn't know im here. Nothing does. No eyes or ears to see or hear. No rules or faces reading.

It only made her feel more isolated. Elsa found this to be well enough at first. It was so beautifully surreal, the silence. Every movement she made was reverberated throughout her surroundings. Turning left on the road, past the hedge, she could see, half a mile ahead of her, a dirt road with a stream adjacent to it. There was another dirt road above it, an old railway, now seiged by trees. It was historic.

It was old and beautiful to her. Even as she felt the weight of her clothes, the chill through her legs, the vague dampness in her shoes, she could not help feeling so at peace. It was not simply to be alone. It was to be alone and yet be surrounded by space. Only a view of the stars would make it more beautiful. She walked, carefully at first, down the dirt path. Then, as the houses receded, she soon found her steps firm and she felt compelled to sing.

And so she did sing. So lost in it that she would often find herself stopping, just to hear the world around her. Hearing the birds. Hearing the trees, the wind.

She was never more content than now. Lost to sound. Lost to place. Lost to setting. This was what liberation felt like, she thought.

The sun had now cast its hand above the dead railway and it was getting lower. She hoped it would leave the fields, for now.

If time is limited, why is it THIS limited?

The sun used to terrify Elsa. When she was 7, she became obsessed with space and the solar system. She knew all the planets, all the moons, she knew how far they were and what they were made of. She still did.

But then she got to the sun. And she got scared. One day, many years in the future, the sun would expand, it would swallow the earth, taking with it absolutely everything. Her being dead in many years time offered little comfort and from then on, she never trusted the sun.

She adored how it gave her life, her skin, her energy...but one day, like us, it was going to die. To Elsa, she imagined it would be like a mother dying. A pain she had so far been happily spared

She looked at the cracked dirt road once more, still singing. Then she found she could not sing. She had stopped. Not by choice. She had went down another of her thought tunnels.

Elsa! Stop daydreaming and get to work.

Her teachers never rested. And neither did her Mother. She was beginning to think of school, of herself and how no one seemed to keep her in their thoughts except as some irritant worthy of displacement. Surely that wasnt the case?

She paced back towards the house unevenly, almost hoping to fall and embrace the ground and sleep...god she wished to sleep soundly. She did lie in the grass by the side of the quiet road, and for the nicest of moments, the wind passed over her face without hurting her eyes.

She could stay like this for the rest of her life. Let the stars pass over, over and over. Let the grass grow over her. She began to enter a state not unlike sleep. The wind rubbed her body, letting her rest. She finally felt calm. Truly calm. The type of calm she never seemed to have.

She saw a purple shroud, it was foamy, not unlike the sea. Then it flowed and licked about in front of her. The wind got louder and it got stronger, the shroud kept growing. She wasn't aware of how lost one could be in their own mind. It made Elsa wonder if she was alone to be like this and have no one to share it with.

To be so obsessive, so curious and so strange, at least to everyone else.

She was now 12. She knew she was not quite like the other children. She much preferred adults. Adults listened to her and responded, or at least, anyone who was not her Mother did. But they were not friends. She was looking at her colleagues and it was more than just a wish for a friend. She was beginning to find things in them she did not before. Even some things that she found interesting. It made her world tingled with worry.

Am i really alone? And if so, why does this not bother me? Oh but it does. Maybe im different but im not stupid. I don't wish to be alone. Not forever. Love and touch has no interest to me, but friendship...oh, i wonder what a friend is like. Im so pathetic. I don't even know.

She didn't know what she was. She knew she was weird. Mum called her special. Dad she wasn't ever sure. But she had no words for herself, and no amount of chess or history was going to help her.

Do friends care for you?

All she could think of was how cruelly she had been treated in her life. She was never quite comfortable around people. Bullied for throwing her cap at the fence posts, to catch it, because she liked the challenge and she saw it in a film. Laughed at for saying things that made sense. Chosen last all the time. Always nitpicked, always prodded at with words and sayings she couldn't grasp.

Why do they set out to get me? What have i done wrong? How can i be more like them? To appease them?

This made her think too much and she was snapped from the abyss. The sun had conquered the far ahead fields and was getting ever closer to her white walled, hedge sided home. She walked calmly back to the house, retreated over the fence and took off her hateful jacket, leaving it outside in the garden. Its feeling was getting too much for her. She felt an urge to itch all over herself and she was agitated to no end. She hated feeling unhappy and worried over things that seemed so little in the universe at large.

She powered through the hall to her room and ended up near panicked. In the end she did not sleep. Mother woke her at 8 and the day began once more. She cared for nothing except more sleep. The other children were there at school. She wished she could fall asleep anywhere and never wake. Never again have to worry about it all.

How she hated everyone. Mum. The teachers and especially the other children. She hated them. She fantasised about hurting them, but she never acted upon it. In the end it just left her feeling guilt. Guilt at being so different and yet powerless to become more like the others. She was alone.

As far as Elsa Antonia was concerned, she would be alone forever.

But she wished it was not so.


End file.
